Underapproximate Reachability Analysis for a Class of Linear Systems With Inputs

Underapproximations of reachable sets and tubes have been receiving growing research attention due to their important roles in control synthesis and verification. Available underapproximation methods applicable to continuous-time linear systems typically assume the ability to compute transition matrices and their integrals exactly, which is not feasible in general, and/or suffer from high computational costs. In this note, we attempt to overcome these drawbacks for a class of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems, where we propose a novel method to underapproximate finite-time forward reachable sets and tubes, utilizing approximations of the matrix exponential and its integral. In particular, we consider the class of continuous-time LTI systems with an identity input matrix and initial and input values belonging to full-dimensional sets that are affine transformations of closed unit balls. The proposed method yields computationally efficient underapproximations of reachable sets and tubes, when implemented using zonotopes, with first-order convergence guarantees in the sense of the Hausdorff distance. To illustrate its performance, we implement our approach in three numerical examples, where linear systems of dimensions ranging between 2 and 200 are considered.